Item 2018.260.3 - White Levi's 501 jeans

Levi’s is a brand of jeans produced by American company Levi Strauss & Co. The company was established in San Francisco by German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss (1829–1902) in 1853, originally to sell dry goods and garments manufactured on the East Coast. They began supplying ready-made work trousers, called ‘waist overalls’, out of cotton indigo-dyed denim across the American West. They were worn by miners, mill workers, railroad workers, lumberjacks and cowboys. Jacob W. Davis (1831–1908), a Jewish tailor in Reno, Nevada, sourced denim cloth from the company and developed a process to strengthen stress points on the garments by adding copper rivets to the bespoke overalls he was making. Davis partnered with Levi Strauss & Co. to expand production, and in 1873 they were granted a joint patent for the innovation. In 1890 the overalls were given the production lot number 501, the name of the design model still in production.
From the 1920s denim jeans began expanding beyond the market for heavy work wear; cowboy films produced by Hollywood exposed the garment to a wider audience; during the Second World War, American servicemen took Levi’s jeans with them abroad. Film was again pivotal in the 1950s for Levi’s, as movies such as The Wild One (1953) starring Marlon Brando and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) featuring James Dean created an association of the label with youth, rebellion and cool. Levi’s had become sought-after worldwide. In the early 1950s, the company opened their first UK factory in Acton, London (moving to Northampton in 1973) and by 1954 Bill Green, owner of the pioneering Vince Man’s Shop in Soho, London, was selling unshrunk Levi’s both in his shop and by mail order. The company became a global fashion brand through the 1960s and 1970s; 1980 saw 25 million pairs of jeans sold in the UK, up from 6 million pairs in 1970, with Levi’s dominating the market. However, later in the 1980s saw a drop in sales prompting the company to commission a series of influential advertising campaigns in the UK and, in 1985, the £4 million pan-European television and cinema spots ‘Bath’ and ‘Laundrette’ for Levi’s 501. June 1986 saw British street style magazine BLITZ commissioning twenty-two designers to customize a Levi’s denim trucker jacket to raise money for charity. Designers of the jackets included Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Katharine Hamnett and were displayed for three months at the V&A Museum.

Launched in 1999, the Levi’s RED collection drew inspiration from the brand’s history and refined it into a product with a streamlined, minimalist design aesthetic. The company introduced Levi’s Engineered Jeans in the same year, which deconstructed and redesigned the standard five-pocket jeans for comfort and mobility. In 2000 Levi’s formed a design research label, the Industrial Clothing Division+ (ICD+) in collaboration with Philips Electronics and Italian designer Massimo Osti. Philips had been focusing their research and development on a project called Philips Wearable Electronics, and the ICD+ range was the first outcome available to consumers. Levi’s has also collaborated with Junya Watanabe, Supreme, Heron Preston, Beams, Google and Lego.
Sources: Michael Harris, Jeans of the Old West: A History (Atglen. PA: Schiffer, 2016); Emma McClendon, Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with the Fashion Institute of Technology, 2016); Paul Jobling, Advertising Menswear: Masculinity and Fashion in the British Media Since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Daniela Facchinato, Ideas from Massimo Osti (Bologna: Damiani, 2012); Iain R. Webb, As Seen in BLITZ: Fashioning ’80s Style (Woodbridge: ACC, 2014); The Guardian.